I grew up on a dairy farm and drank raw milk. Mother would keep a jar on the counter where she would collect what we didnt drink after meals. After a while it would sour and get chunky. Would use it to make sour milk pancakes. Imagine eating pancakes and biting into bits of feta cheese. Pastuerized milk wouldnt sour. It would spoil.
But yes, I have always wondered how they figured out how to make bread and the like.
My grandmother used to eat what she called ‘clabber’ - basically, sour, clotted milk.
I’m thinking that what she had been eating may have actually been ‘yogurt’, which word she had never learned until the 1980s, when I introduced her to what she then called ‘eegert’ ;-)
When you look at the history of civilization, and all the technologies that ancient civilizations somehow developed ‘out of nothing’, it seems impossible, to me, that it all came out of pedestrian ‘trial and error’.
There must have been something ELSE going on...
Did y’all use the standard butter churn? Make cottage cheese? I envy you :)